Chapter 15
Wendigos were hard as shit to kill.
Jon was right, not that Blade would ever admit it. The bastards were fast. And they were also already corpses. The bodies appeared to be animated by evil, so with no bodily functions, Blade’s ability to stop heartbeats or collapse lungs was of no use.
Scotty cursed as her blade sliced through a wendigo’s skull and didn’t so much as slow it down. “What the fuck?”
Blade leaped over the screaming wendigo on the ground, one arm and leg severed by Blade’s bone-cutter knife. He came down hard, burying the blade in the back of another wendigo’s neck. It shrieked and swiped at him with one spindly arm, slamming Blade into a stone pillar.
They were getting their asses kicked.
“There’s five of them,” Scotty shouted. She hurled herself into the closest one, replacing her summoned blade with a smaller KA-BAR for hand-to-hand combat.
Her timing was dead-on, and the fiend’s head ripped loose from its neck and dropped to the ground, the open maw twisted in a silent scream. “Four!”
And several dead demons.
The demons weren’t hard to kill, but they were distracting, attacking from all sides in overwhelming numbers that made it hard to fight off the wendigo assaults.
“We could really use Mace,” he shouted back, as he kicked an imp so hard its spine punched through its paunchy belly. Simultaneously, he hurled a throwing star into a wendigo’s eye.
Suddenly, a stream of fire and searing heat blasted through the cave. Blade and Scotty dove behind a pile of rocks, barely missing being toasted by Jon’s flamethrower.
Demons and wendigos screeched as the fire engulfed them. The moment Jon tossed aside the flamethrower, they jumped back into the fray.
It was so much easier to decapitate wendigos that writhed on the ground, all charred and crispy.
“I love the smell of roasted evil in the morning,” Skoll said, as he impaled an imp with a dagger.
Scotty barked out a laugh. “Sounds like something Mace would say.”
Her smile faded, and her summoned sword flickered between being solid and transparent. She swore at it before making it disappear and replacing it with the dagger on her hip.
She’d always had trouble maintaining a summoned weapon when her concentration was divided. Blade got that. His mind kept jumping to Mace in the most inconvenient moments. Like now, as he finished off an injured demon as it skittered toward an exit.
Mace was most likely fine, healed by the best doctors on the planet. But until Blade got confirmation, he wasn’t gonna relax. The not knowing for sure was a killer. Then there was the fact that he and Scotty needed to tell him what they’d done…
The caves, which had seemed so big and cavernous before, closed in on Blade. Dead and dying demons and wendigos littered the ground, their blood pooling or running in rivulets along the rock crevices. The place reeked of death, charred meat, and bowels, and Blade found himself wanting out. Now.
“Blade!” Jon shouted. “Behind you!”
He whirled around, but not quickly enough to avoid the razor-sharp claws of a skeletal fiend that had somehow risen from the ashes. It’s crunchy, blackened skin rasped as it raked its claws across Blade’s chest, slicing his weapons harness in half and taking some of his shirt and skin with it.
Scotty leaped across several dead bodies and stabbed the demon in the throat, dropping it to the ground. With a snarl, she whacked off its head and then rounded on Blade.
“What the hell was that?” She sounded just like her father when he was giving them a dressing-down. “You’re not usually so sloppy.”
“Trust me, I know.” Angry at his own carelessness, he cursed. “I was thinking about Mace.”
“Oh.” She put away her weapons. “He’ll understand, Blade.” Scotty sounded confident, but the doubt in her eyes belied her words. She turned to the other guys. “Let’s finish this, and I’ll gate us to HQ. We can fill in Kynan on the mission and then head home.”
Home. Where they would have to fess up to Mace about what they’d done.
His chest tightened as he glanced around at the carnage on the floor of the cave and couldn’t help thinking that he’d rather go another hundred rounds with those wendigos than tell his best friend that he’d broken their oath with their other best friend.
Mace felt like shit.
Physically, he was A-okay. Sort of. Still had to keep his heart rate down.
Mentally, it was a whole other thing.
Like a jerk, he’d thrown fuel on the fire between Wraith and Talon.
And between Talon and him. Not that he cared much what Talon thought of him.
Not really. There had been a time, when he was younger and dumber, that he’d wanted a relationship with his brother.
Had loved his brother. And maybe he still did.
But Talon had made it clear that he didn’t consider Mace a part of the family, let alone his sibling.
Still, the family drama accounted for only a fraction of his anxiety.
He was also agitated by the situation in Alaska.
He was sure his friends were all right, probably having the times of their lives battling freaking wendigos.
But he hated being away from them. Hated not being a part of the team.
Hated not partaking in the glory of a battle. Scotty liked to say he had major FOMO.
Fair enough. He supposed he did have a fear of missing out. But he also wasn’t good at being alone. Unlike Blade, Mace didn’t do the solitary thing well. He never had.
Making everything worse, he was sickened by what was happening to Logan and Eva.
Mace had lived with Logan at the compound for years before he met Eva, but even before that, Logan had been a friend.
His parents, Regan and Thanatos, were tight with Mace’s family, so he’d grown up alongside the son of the Horseman known as Death.
They’d gone to school together, had trained on Ares’s island together, and now, they worked together at DART.
Mace hated seeing Logan’s anguish as he hovered at Eva’s bedside, counting every breath as if she didn’t have many left.
And from what Mace had heard, she didn’t.
His steps were heavy as he traipsed past the compound’s pool on his way to the rear entrance.
With the restrictions on his heart rate, he probably shouldn’t even get in the hot tub.
At ninety percent healed, he was almost as good as new, but his brother had been adamant about the low-heart-rate thing, and since Mace didn’t want his ticker to blow up, he supposed he should follow the rules, no matter how much they sucked.
Maybe he could de-stress the way they did it back in the caveman days. On a Nintendo console, playing Super Mario Bros.
The kitchen and living areas were empty, but that wasn’t a surprise.
Mace had seen Sabre at the hospital, Rade was probably at work, and given that it was three o’clock in the afternoon, Crux was either training on Ares’s island or in his room, taking virtual college courses.
Assuming he was feeling better, that was.
Poor kid’s pre-transition episodes were getting more frequent and severe. Mace cringed just thinking about it.
He grabbed a bottle of sparkling water from the fridge, and as he twisted the cap off, Blade and Scotty filed through the back door.
They looked exhausted but freshly showered, wearing their gym clothes from work.
They often dragged themselves into HQ to report to Tayla or Kynan immediately after an assignment, and if they were in bad shape, covered in blood or guts or whatever, they’d shower before the debriefing.
No one cared if they donned their gym clothes for meetings, because at least they were clean. And not smelling of sweat and bowels.
“Hey.” He grinned so hard his face hurt. He didn’t think he’d ever been so happy to see them.
“Hey.” Blade’s smile seemed forced, as if it was fighting the dark crescents under his eyes. He held up a plastic bag. “Brought you a souvenir from Alaska.”
Scotty, her damp ponytail clinging to her neck, rolled her eyes. “It wasn’t my idea, I swear.”
“This ought to be good.” Eagerly, Mace snatched the bag from Blade and peeked inside. An eyeball, inside a clear globe attached to a fine silver chain, looked up at him. Okaaay. “What the hell is it?”
“Dunno,” Blade said. “We found it inside the wendigo’s lair. Probably some sort of talisman.”
“And you thought bringing an unidentified, undoubtedly evil talisman here was a good idea?”
Scotty punched Blade lightly in the shoulder. “I told you we should have given it to Aleka to study.”
Blade shrugged. “I just didn’t want Mace to feel left out of the hunt.”
“Um, thanks, I guess?” Mace tossed the bag onto the couch. He’d definitely give it to Aleka later. Keeping that thing around likely wouldn’t be the smartest move. He knew from experience. A painful, embarrassing one. “So, how did it go?”
Blade and Scotty exchanged glances, but it wasn’t playful or the kind that said, “You go first.” It was more…surreptitious, and Mace’s Spidey-senses tingled.
Had something gone sideways?
“It went the way it usually goes,” Blade said, sounding enough like his usual self that Mace figured he must have read more into their glances than there was. “We kicked ass.”
“We did,” Scotty followed up. “But forget that. How are you? We didn’t get any news until Kynan filled us in. We were worried sick.”
Mace glanced down at his calf. “No big. Leg is almost better.”
“When did you get released from the hospital?” Blade opened the fridge and tossed a water bottle to Scotty before opening his own.
“I just got home.” A low, throbbing pulse in his thigh told him he’d been standing too long, so he hobbled over to the couch before his heart rate ramped up from the pain. “And dude, you’ll never guess who Raika brought into the ER.”
Blade flung his go-bag onto the floor. “Who?”
He drew out the anticipation by chugging half his water. He’d always liked a side of drama the way everyone else liked a side of fries. “Gabriel.”